


Stages of Grief

by Koren M (CyberMathWitch)



Category: Hawkeye (Comics), The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom, Young Avengers
Genre: Angst, Coping, Extended Absences, F/M, Gen, Language, Mentions of Therapy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-11
Updated: 2013-02-11
Packaged: 2017-11-28 22:36:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/679633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyberMathWitch/pseuds/Koren%20M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Despite the title, NOT a character death fic (other than brief mentions of canonical character death in the past).  Clint and his team go missing for an extended period of time, and Kate has to figure out how to deal with that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stages of Grief

**Author's Note:**

> Lots of cookies for Kadollan for the beta, and for putting up with me pressing the Hawkeye comic (and subsequent fanfiction, though maybe not in that order) on her so that she _could_ beta for me. ;-)
> 
> I somehow hooked onto the idea of how Kate would handle it if Clint (along with his team) just up and vanished on a mission sometime, and didn't come back for months. (Which, let's face it, is bound to happen sooner or later because, hello, have you read Marvel comics? I give you Secret Wars.) - No idea where he is, whether he's alive or dead, etc. Apparently Kate had opinions about this, because the next thing I knew, this had happened. I finally settled on the idea of the stages of grief for a structure, and got the distinct impression that Kate is the kind of person who would be the boss of her own brain and emotions in a lot of ways. She's got this fantastic self-awareness going on that I love.
> 
> I freely admit this is my first foray into this corner of fandom, and I'm mostly familiar with Kate through the Hawkeye comics and fic, so be gentle with me?

It's a perfectly normal Tuesday, except that when Kate gets to the apartment for their usual pizza and patrol, he's not there. By itself, even _that's_ not that unusual, but then she notices that Lucky's water bowl is dry and his food bowl is empty and there's a mess on the floor which must mean he hasn't been walked in awhile.

She puts down food and clean water and gives the dog a hug, then cleans up the mess and calls the first person she can think of, which is Steve, but she doesn't get an answer. Bobbi's the third person down her list but the first person to pick up the phone.

Bobbi doesn't know where they are. The whole team is gone, vanished and she swears she doesn't have any more information than that.

It's only been two days, and she tells herself not to worry. Two days in the grand scheme of superhero life isn't anything at all. 

Kate goes back to her place and grabs several changes of clothes and fills the guys in on what's going on, then goes back to Clint's to camp out and take care of Lucky until he comes back. 

It's been a week when she has to go back and get more clothes. Teddy corners her in her room and asks her if she's ok, tells her that they're worried about her. She tells him she's fine, but someone has to take care of Clint's damn dog. 

After three weeks, when she's pretty much given up on sleep completely, she talks to her therapist. She hedges just a little bit, explains that her friend is missing in action (but doesn't mention what action) - the doctor tells her the nightmares are perfectly normal and goes on to explain the stages of grief. Kate remembers them all to well from when Cassie died. 

She walks home after. It's a long, long walk and in theory it should give her time to think but instead she focuses on absorbing the sights and sounds around her so that she won't have to. Her therapist is in Manhattan, her official apartment is in Manhattan just a few blocks away.

Home is over the bridge in Bed-Stuy. 

*****

**Denial**

Logically, she knows how this works. She can name all the possible options - magic, time, space. They could be in another dimension, another time, another planet. They might be fighting right now, or they might be dead and buried. The only people she can think of to harass for answers are either missing or as clueless as she is, and Kate knows all she can do is wait.

(Even Billy, for all his power, hasn't been able to find out a thing.)

It's more than possible that they're dead. As weeks turn into a month, she knows she has to consider it. But they've (he's) never been dead before, even when everyone thought that he was.

She looks at her list, and the first stage of grief is denial. 

She can do denial. She can deny the possibility that he's dead, and she _will_ deny that he's dead until someone shows her, in person, the fucking body.

So, he's not dead, which means he's coming back, which means he'll need a place to live and a dog to come home to. So someone has to take care of his tenants and keep the utilities turned on and the DVR up to date, because she knows the first thing he'll want is a shower, followed by a pizza and a beer and some stupid show to scrub whatever awful things he's seen out of his head.

She makes a check mark beside denial on her list.

Time for the next stage.

*****

**Anger**

The problem with anger as a coping mechanism is that Kate doesn't know what to apply the anger _to_. She's furious and she's scared, and she's furious _that_ she's scared. She wants to be mad at whoever's taken them, but she doesn't know for sure if they've been taken. She wants to be mad at Clint for doing something stupid, except that she doesn't know for sure that he _has_ or if he did, what it could be.

She takes it out on Tony Stark - she hunts him down and demands to know where the hell the others are. When she gets there, the lines on his face are deeper than the last time she saw him, and he isn't hiding the strain in his voice when he tells her he doesn't know. She decides she believes him, but that still doesn't change how much anger she's got bubbling up with nowhere to go.

The anger is bad enough by itself, but then they all get into a fight with some stronger-than-normal Doom-Bots, and she comes out of it hyped up on adrenaline, too. Normally, she'd find Clint and they'd patrol, or watch stupid action movies, or work out to burn it off, but she doesn't want to do any of those things because she's still too damn angry and none of them seem like _enough_.

America suggests a club and the idea of dark lights and heavy beats seems just about right so she agrees. They spend the first hour or so dancing together, then drift apart to dance with other people. A guy who says he's an engineering student at NYU is the most interesting, he's got a brain and he's hot and when the club gets ready to close and he asks if she wants to go somewhere more private she makes sure America's okay to get home and then agrees.

They walk for awhile, and he's attractive and a good kisser and she's feeling how the dancing and the kissing has shifted the anger and adrenaline into another kind of burn. She means to take him back to the apartment, because she doesn't really think about it, but they get about a block away and she realizes she doesn't want a relative stranger there, doesn't want to wake up and find anyone else in the kitchen or on the couch and she has no idea what Lucky will think of him. Instead, she picks the lock on the building next door and takes him up to the roof, thankful that it's a warm night. He's good and it's fun and by the time they've both gotten off she's relaxed and the sharpest edge of the adrenaline has worn away and everything is more manageable in the aftermath. 

He makes noises about seeing her again, and she says maybe coffee sometime and if he were to call, maybe she even would. Maybe. Probably not.

As it turns out, three days later when he does ask her out, she's standing ankle deep in water in Simone's apartment where the water heater just blew, trying to coordinate a repair job and clean up, and she has to pass. From his tone of voice, she doesn't quite think he believes the "I'm a stand-in landlord and I've got maintenance problems" excuse, but oh well.

Turns out, beating the shit out of the broken water heater right before they plumber carts it away is a remarkably good way of dealing with things.

*****

Kate Bishop doesn't bargain.

She demands. She insists. She decrees. She barrels over, crawls under, or pushes through whatever stands in her way.

Fuck bargaining.

_(She marks it out with a thick, black line instead of a tidy little check mark.)_

Moving on.

*****

**Depression**

She drops Lucky in Bobbi's lap (almost literally) right before Billy teleports them off to god-knows-where to fight some kind of demons. She's gone for a week, and in the brief moments when they're not fighting for their lives, she imagines stepping back in to a reality where he's beaten her back home, or maybe one where he's never left. 

The apartment is empty and cold when she stumbles in exhausted and slimy and aching. She knows the others are worried about her, that they wanted her to stay with them so everyone was close but she just can't and instead she's alone. She didn't stop by Bobbi's because it was two a.m. so Lucky isn't even there to help keep her warm. She fights with the heater, then drags herself from the shower to the bed and barely manages to pull up the blankets before she's asleep. 

She doesn't really wake up for two days.

And that's not depression, no matter what sideways looks she gets from Teddy that says he doesn't believe her when he finds out. They've been picking up a lot of the slack that's left over from the team that's gone missing, she's got 15 hours of classes this semester, and after a week in another dimension fighting almost non-stop she needs a minute or 2000 to recuperate. 

It's the third day, when she's awake and alert but still locked up in the apartment with no one for company but the dog - _that's_ depression, and she gives herself space to really feel it. She notices everything about the apartment that reminds her of Clint - lets the sadness and the loneliness really sink in. She even cries herself to sleep and that's somehow cathartic, she remembers that now, remembers doing this when Cassie died and Jonas left, even though she still believes that Clint's _not dead_. 

_She gave up sleeping on the couch before they'd even left for that hell dimension (if she's going to be living there, she might as well be comfortable) and even though she washes the sheets every week or so the blankets still smell like Clint and that's more comforting than she's willing to admit._

On the fifth day back she wakes up and pushes it away because she's got classes, she's got training, she's got a team to lead and a world to save. It still slips up on her from time to time, and there are more days than she'd like that she goes through without entirely being _in_ them. 

She dreams about him one night, and the kicker is that she _knows_ it's a dream. It's probably better that way, that she doesn't have the hope and the let down of waking up, but for just a little while, he's standing at the kitchen counter next to her, drinking the shitty coffee straight out of the pot and he fixes her with a pointed stare and asks her what the hell she's doing, being depressed over him.

_"Get your act together, girly-girl. Wherever I am, whatever I'm doing, I sure as hell don't want you wasting away on me or some shit."_

_"I'm not 'wasting away', dumb ass. I'm taking care of your crappy apartment while you're gone. Gotta have some place to live when you come back," she mumbles the last part more to herself than to him, looking away because even in the dream her eyes are burning just a little bit._

_He reaches out and takes her chin in his hand, turning her face back up to look at him, and it's not quite like him because yes, this is definitely a dream._

_"Katie, I may not be coming home. You know that, right? I got no problem with you bein' here, I appreciate you taking care of Lucky, and the place, and the people, and I probably got it written down somewhere that most all 'a this goes to you, anyhow. If not, well. Bobbi and Cap'll know what to do with it and you'll still get it when you ask for it, 'cause it's more important to you than it is to them. But you gotta face that I may not come home this time, and you gotta keep living. You're good at that, girly. I know you are."_

When she opens her eyes, her face is wet and Lucky's crawled up onto the bed next to her, but she somehow feels lighter than she has in a long time. After her morning class she calls Teddy and asks if they want her to bring over pizza and movies and she pretends not to hear the relief in his voice when he says yes.

She knows there will still be good days and bad days, but finally, she checks depression off the list.

*****

**Acceptance**

It's been about ten and a half months, and if you'd asked her before she opened the door to the apartment, she'd've been able to tell you down to the hour how long he's been gone.

It's been long enough that she doesn't really have anything left at the apartment the guys all share. It's been long enough she's stopped hoping to see him when she opens the door. She still won't say that he's dead, but she's accepted that he's _gone_ and she's really trying to move on.

Then she opens the door, and there's a figure sprawled haphazardly across the couch, and a familiar bow and quiver sitting to the side, and her heart feels like it's in her throat and she isn't even entirely aware that her knees give out and she slips down to sit on the floor with her back against the door frame. There's no telling how long she sits like that, afraid to move because that might break the spell, or shake her out of the hallucination, or something. Finally, he shifts and grunts a little, and she pushes herself back up to her feet. Lucky is stretched out on the floor beside him, and his hand is buried in the dog's fur. There's just enough room at the other end for her to curl up there, legs tangling alongside his in a way that's all at once familiar and painful and _real_. 

Something in her chest loosens, something she didn't even realize was too tight, and she feels like she can take a deep breath again.


End file.
